Political scientist and media critic

March 10, 2015

Although the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s email is unlikely to damage her chances to reach the White House, her use of a private account as secretary of state suggests a larger set of concerns about her management approach. How did her staff not warn her about the political and security risks? And why didn’t they protect her more effectively once those risks became clear?

According to New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, the imbroglio “revives the larger question of whether Clinton is capable of managing a competent campaign (and thus, in turn, a competent administration).” He cites as evidence the turmoil within Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign, which was widely seen as mismanaged.

But what’s striking about these failures is how different they are. The paradox of Mrs. Clinton’s leadership style is that she often seems to simultaneously have too many advisers and too few.

March 04, 2015

The report Monday that Hillary Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state raises a number of important questions about government transparency and access to public records.

Unsurprisingly, however, the conversation quickly veered from matters of policy into ominous speculation about the political consequences for Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic Party presidential front-runner, including hyperbolic suggestions that the emails could “shake up the 2016 race,” cause irreparable damage to her, cause her to lose the general election, or even help force her out of the race.

The actual public response to the controversy is likely to be a combination of apathy and partisanship.

February 21, 2015

When Rudolph Giuliani said that he does “not believe that the president loves America,” he became the latest in a long line of public figures to question the loyalty or allegiance of the country’s first nonwhite president. While these criticisms are ostensibly directed at Barack Obama’s worldview, as Mr. Giuliani later said, they appear to reflect — or exploit — the tendency to associate being American with being white.

Mr. Obama’s loyalty to the United States has been questioned in this way since he reached the national stage. Just as people wrongly doubted that the president was born here, many prominent figures in national politics have smeared him as disloyal, often by suggesting that he is on the side of Islamic extremists (which plays on the related myth that he is Muslim rather than Christian).

February 13, 2015

For decades, Democrats have been the party that emphasizes concerns about inequality. So why are many top Republicans — including a number of the party’s presidential hopefuls — talking about the issue?

“Issue ownership” theories predict that parties and candidates will emphasize issues on which they have an advantage — specifically, ones in which the public tends to see their party as more competent. For instance, Democrats historically “own” education and health care, while Republicans are typically seen as better on crime and national security. Given that the G.O.P. has prioritized economic growth and opportunity over distributional concerns in recent decades, we would therefore expect concerns about inequality to be voiced primarily by Democrats like Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, not Republicans.

Yet last week, Jeb Bush gave a speech in Detroit titled “Restoring the Right to Rise in America” — the latest in a series of proposals and statements by top Republicans focusing on the rapid increase of income inequality in this country.

February 02, 2015

Will a measles outbreak persuade more parents to vaccinate their children?

That’s the question people are asking as concern grows about the outbreak linked to Disneyland that has spread to 67 cases across seven states.

Some doctors have expressed hope that parents will be more likely to get their children immunized. I hope they’re right, but research suggests that the long-term effects of the outbreak could be worse, not better. The social and political conflicts we’ve seen emerge over the outbreak threaten to polarize the issue along political lines and weaken the social consensus in favor of vaccination.

January 27, 2015

Public service announcement: For now, you should ignore surveys testing potential Democrat/Republican matchups for the 2016 presidential election.

I’m referring to polls like The Washington Post-ABC News survey released last week, which made headlines with the finding that Hillary Clinton enjoys a big lead against Republicans like Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney. Other media organizations have also been releasing head-to-head polls like this, and more are sure to follow in the coming months.

I realize it’s tempting to believe that these head-to-head polls have at least a little bit of meaningful information in them. Poll numbers are irresistible to political obsessives like me, but it’s just too early for them to be useful in forecasting the general election.

January 22, 2015

It’s audition time for presidential candidates in the “invisible primary” — the critical period before the state primaries and caucuses in which party elites help choose the eventual nominees.

While Hillary Clinton is the overwhelming favorite on the Democratic side, internal divisions among Republicans are making it hard for pundits — or betting markets — to predict the likely G.O.P. nominee. Endorsements by donors, elected officials and other elites are the best observable indicator of which candidate has the party support needed to win the nomination, but few have been made at this point...

I’ve therefore adopted a different approach to help size up the Republican nomination contest. Taking inspiration from sports analysts who use qualitative and quantitative methods to identify the best comparisons for individual athletes, I’ve identified the historical candidate who I think most resembles each of the top six G.O.P. contenders. I also created a computer algorithm that matched current and former candidates...

January 20, 2015

State of the Union addresses — like most presidential speeches – rarely produce a bump in job approval ratings or bring around lawmakers of the opposite party. So why does tonight matter?

[T]he issues presidents emphasize in the State of the Union seem to affect which areas are rated most important by the public. In this way, President Obama may be able to help set the issue agenda for his last two years in office and the 2016 election...

But Mr. Obama faces a significant challenge — breaking through the clutter that increasingly hinders presidential efforts to communicate with the public.

December 12, 2014

When will we give up on the idea of a leader who will magically bring consensus and unity to our politics?

At election time, candidates seduce us with promises to bring America together, but inevitably fall short while in office and end up leaving office with the country more polarized than when they arrived. After blaming them for their failure to unite us, we turn to the next crop of presidential aspirants, and the cycle of hope and disappointment begins all over again.

December 11, 2014

Jason Reifler and I have a new study in Vaccine on the effect of correcting the myth that the flu vaccine gives you the flu. Here's the abstract:

Seasonal influenza is responsible for thousands of deaths and billions of dollars of medical costs per year in the United States, but influenza vaccination coverage remains substantially below public health targets. One possible obstacle to greater immunization rates is the false belief that it is possible to contract the flu from the flu vaccine. A nationally representative survey experiment was conducted to assess the extent of this flu vaccine misperception. We find that a substantial portion of the public (43%) believes that the flu vaccine can give you the flu. We also evaluate how an intervention designed to address this concern affects belief in the myth, concerns about flu vaccine safety, and future intent to vaccinate. Corrective information adapted from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website significantly reduced belief in the myth that the flu vaccine can give you the flu as well as concerns about its safety. However, the correction also significantly reduced intent to vaccinate among respondents with high levels of concern about vaccine side effects – a response that was not observed among those with low levels of concern. This result, which is consistent with previous research on misperceptions about the MMR vaccine, suggests that correcting myths about vaccines may not be an effective approach to promoting immunization.

This graph illustrates our key finding, which is that corrective information actually decreased intent to vaccinate among people with high levels of concern about vaccine side effects:

December 02, 2014

One of the key factors driving the growing scandal surrounding Bill Cosby is shared awareness of the numerous rape allegations against him, which has prompted media companies and his beloved Temple University to distance themselves from him while encouraging new accusers to come forward.

A Rolling Stone article has had a similarly galvanizing effect at the University of Virginia by reporting a pattern of sexual assaults on campus. The attention it drew to the issue prompted Teresa A. Sullivan, the university’s president, to suspend all fraternity activities until January.

Most accounts of sexual assault never reach this level of awareness, however. Few are even reported. One reason is that reporting systems on college campuses and in the criminal justice system are widely regarded as unfriendly to victims. In particular, even though research suggests that many rapists engage in repeated attacks, survivors of sexual assault are rarely aware of other victims or able to come forward together.

Callisto, an online sexual assault reporting system under development by a nonprofit called Sexual Health Innovations, aims to change this and provide better options for victims of sexual assault on college campuses.

November 20, 2014

On Wednesday, the cable network TV Land pulled reruns of “The Cosby Show” from the air, a development that echoed decisions by NBC to drop a sitcom starring Mr. Cosby and Netflix’s announcement that it would postpone the release of his new comedy special.

What’s surprising is the way that rape allegations against Mr. Cosby, which go back decades, have become so damaging to him now.

According to the research of Ari Adut, a University of Texas sociologist, moral scandals like this one arise when a suspected transgression becomes common knowledge.

November 13, 2014

Imagine you are President Obama. You have about two more years in office, but your agenda is dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled Congress that takes over in January. What do you do?

One obvious strategy is to search for areas of common ground. However, the prospects for resolving existing stalemates in Washington on issues like immigration reform are unclear...

Instead, Mr. Obama may seek to bring new issues into the conversation. That’s what he did Monday when he called on the Federal Communications Commission to promote “net neutrality”...

[T]he President’s increasingly public embrace of net neutrality (which he has supported since his 2008 campaign) could come at a significant cost. Though Congress is already divided along party lines on the issue, Mr. Obama’s advocacy could strengthen Republican opposition to the issue.

November 06, 2014

America has again embraced our long history of electoral overreaction. While it’s true that Republicans won a major victory at the polls, the results tell us far less about future elections than some commentary has suggested.

In particular, the widespread Democratic losses weren’t a “repudiation” of Hillary Rodham Clinton (who played a minor role). But despite claims that they actually offer her a useful opportunity to contrast herself with a Republican Congress, she doesn’t face a “great situation” for her prospective 2016 presidential candidacy either.

November 03, 2014

Election Day creates a vast information vacuum — millions of Americans (and hundreds of reporters) are trying to figure out the outcome of an event before it has been decided. With few useful indicators of what is actually happening at the polls, rumors and misinformation can run rampant. Here’s how to avoid getting fooled.

October 24, 2014

In this polarized age, have citizens retreated into information cocoons of like-minded media sources?

A new Pew Research Center report found that the outlets people name as their main sources of information about news and politics are strongly correlated with their political views....

The Pew study has been widely interpreted to mean that people are living in partisan and ideological echo chambers — a fear that has been frequently expressed as new communication technologies have expanded the media choices of consumers...

But have the predictions of widespread media echo chambers really come true?

October 16, 2014

After a second case of Ebola was discovered among the staff of a Dallas hospital that treated an infected patient, public concerns are likely to increase about whether the United States health care system can properly respond to an outbreak.

Data from surveys suggest, however, that those views — like so many others — are being shaped by people’s partisan affilations as much as by news about the outbreak itself.

October 10, 2014

What’s more dangerous — flying on an airplane or driving to the airport? In general, auto accidents are a far greater threat than plane crashes, but we tend to devote more attention to dramatic or novel risks like threats to aviation safety.

The same principle applies to the Ebola virus. Although the outbreak is a substantial threat in West Africa, a region plagued by weak government and failing public health systems, the risk to Americans is currently minimal. By contrast, the seasonal flu kills thousands of people every year but receives relatively little attention.

October 06, 2014

Who has the edge in November’s congressional elections? According to the fund-raising emails being sent out, no one does.

Instead, both parties claim to be on the brink of defeat. Fund-raising pleas from political figures ranging from the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, to Senator Rand Paul tell voters that the campaign is close but their side is losing...

Why do campaigns keep saying they’re losing? These doom-and-gloom messages seem to be effective at motivating donors. The best evidence to support this claim comes from a new study by the social scientists Todd Rogers of Harvard and Don A. Moore of the University of California, Berkeley.

September 29, 2014

It’s no surprise that interesting and unusual claims are often the most widely circulated articles on social media. Who wants to share boring stuff?

The problem, however, is that the spread of rumors, misinformation and unverified claims can overwhelm any effort to set the record straight, as we’ve seen during controversies over events like the Boston Marathon bombings and the conspiracy theory that the Obama administration manipulated unemployment statistics.

Everyone knows there is dubious information online, of course, but estimating the magnitude of the problem has been difficult until now.

September 18, 2014

In 2013, the federal government spent over $30 billion to support basic scientific research. These funds help create knowledge and stimulate greater productivity and commercial activity, but could we get an even better return on our investment?

The problem is that the research conducted using federal funds is driven — and distorted — by the academic publishing model. The intense competition for space in top journals creates strong pressures for novel, statistically significant effects. As a result, studies that do not turn out as planned or find no evidence of effects claimed in previous research often go unpublished, even though their findings can be important and informative.

September 10, 2014

Dealing with health care needs at the end of life is a difficult but unavoidable issue in an aging society with rising health care costs like ours. After a failed attempt to deal with the issue as part of the Affordable Care Act, it may again be returning to the policy agenda. Can we avoid another catastrophic bout of misinformation?

The debate over end-of-life planning has largely been dormant since 2009, when the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s false claim that President Obama’s health care plan included a “death panel” spelled the end of a proposal for Medicare to reimburse doctors for voluntary end-of-life consultations with patients. The Obama administration briefly issued and then withdrew a regulation that would have added end-of-life consultation coverage to Medicare in early 2011, but is likely to revisit the issue after receiving a recommendation from an influential American Medical Association panel.

Unfortunately, the lesson from the “death panel” controversy is that this issue is vulnerable to demagoguery if it becomes linked to people’s partisanship or feelings about controversial political figures and issues.

September 02, 2014

Labor Day signals the beginning of the fall campaign for both political candidates and the consultants whom they pay hundreds of millions of dollars to help them win in November. Will these hired guns be held accountable for their performance on Election Day?

The experience of John McLaughlin, the pollster for the former House majority leader, Eric Cantor of Virginia, suggests that the consequences of consultant failure are often minimal. As the Washington Post’s Ben Terris noted, Mr. McLaughlin was “historically wrong” about Mr. Cantor’s defeat in a June primary, missing the final margin by approximately 45 percentage points, but hasn’t lost any clients as a result.

A closer look at the research on political consultants suggests that Mr. McLaughlin’s experience is typical. Firm reputations and client relationships are highly consistent over time and show little responsiveness to results, particularly in terms of the share of the vote that a client receives, a much more informative metric than wins and losses.

August 25, 2014

Misinformation about politics may often seem silly — the immigration bill will give out free cars! — but the consequences of false beliefs in public health can be deadly.

In the developed world, myths about the risks of vaccines have enabled the resurgence of communicable diseases like measles and pertussis. And in developing countries, false beliefs have hindered efforts to fight H.I.V./AIDS and eradicate polio in countries like Nigeria and Pakistan.

The latest example of the dangers of health misinformation comes from Western Africa, where the response to an Ebola outbreak in four countries has been hampered by conspiracy theories about its causes and phony rumors about how to treat it. False beliefs may not be the biggest obstacle to containing the Ebola outbreak, but they make an awful situation worse.

August 14, 2014

Before Thursday, President Barack Obama had issued only a brief written statement about the events in Ferguson, Mo., a St. Louis suburb that erupted in protests after Saturday’s killing of an unarmed black youth, Michael Brown, by a police officer.

But he soon came under pressure to address events there more forcefully, prompting him to interrupt his vacation in order to make a public statement today.

In the modern era, we expect presidents to weigh in on almost every major news story – an impulse that reflects our desire for them to appear to be in control of events...

August 08, 2014

With hopes fading of passing an immigration reform bill, President Obama is reportedly contemplating bypassing Congress and making sweeping changes to immigration policy before the midterm elections.

Many analysts think the executive action under consideration and its political fallout could, as Ronald Brownstein put it in The National Journal, “define both the Democratic and Republican parties for the burgeoning Hispanic population.”

But what isn’t clear is why Mr. Obama would engage in such a move before the election. Of course, Mr. Obama faces short-term pressures to address the surge in migrant children being detained at the border, but news media reports suggest that the policy changes under consideration would be far broader, potentially providing legal status to many of the nation’s undocumented immigrants.

Such a broad executive action could provoke a backlash in the midterm elections that might be avoided with a move just a few months later.

July 30, 2014

A useful definition of a wedge issue is one that unifies a party while splitting the opposition.

By that definition, Republican calls to impeach President Obama look like a wedge issue — in favor of Democrats. As a recent CNN poll shows, 65 percent of Americans oppose impeaching Obama, including 86 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of independents and even 42 percent of Republicans.

Given those numbers, no one should be surprised that Democrats are playing up the possibility of impeachment.

July 25, 2014

How much do members of the opposite party dislike whoever happens to be president? A lot, and the feeling seems to be getting stronger.

A Quinnipiac University poll found that Barack Obama was the most frequent choice of Americans who were asked to name the worst president since World War II (33 percent compared with 28 percent who named George W. Bush). As a measure of people’s considered beliefs about presidential quality, the question is likely to overrepresent more recent presidents. But this sort of poll is instructive about the extent of the polarization among the public – in particular, about the visceral hostility to the president that has become routine among opposition partisans.

July 24, 2014

One of the most common criticisms of presidents – especially struggling ones during their second term – is that they have lost control of events.

This charge, which has been leveled at chief executives such as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, has become a mantra lately in coverage of President Obama, who faces a stalled legislative agenda and crises in Ukraine, Gaza and at the border with Mexico.

What happened? One frequent explanation from pundits and journalists is that Mr. Obama has “little control” and is instead being “driven” or “buffeted” by events.

July 14, 2014

When an unpopular president faces a difficult midterm election, candidates from his party tend to avoid him and try to focus on local issues, but the nationalization of politics has made this strategy increasingly difficult. Instead, some red-state Democrats are going out of their way to talk about President Obama more than other Senate candidates from their party — and not always in a good way.

July 05, 2014

Do Americans understand the scientific consensus about issues like climate change and evolution?

At least for a substantial portion of the public, it seems like the answer is no...

As a result of surveys like these, scientists and advocates have concluded that many people are not aware of the evidence on these issues and need to be provided with correct information...

[But] when [Yale Law School professor Dan Kahan] instead tested whether respondents knew the theory of evolution, omitting mention of belief, there was virtually no difference between more and less religious people with high scientific familiarity. In other words, religious people knew the science; they just weren’t willing to say that they believed in it.

July 01, 2014

Hillary Clinton’s artificially inflated poll numbers have made her seem like an especially strong presidential candidate, but the Clinton bubble is quickly coming to an end.

Earlier in June, Ross Douthat of The New York Times noted that she has been “leading every potential Republican candidate by around 10 points” and “running far ahead of President Obama’s job approval numbers.” Carl Cannon, the Real Clear Politics Washington bureau chief, cited her standing as the most admired woman in America, a contest in which she easily topped Oprah in 2013.

But Ms. Clinton’s re-entry on the political stage over the last few weeks is turning her back into what she was before her stint as Secretary of State: an intensely polarizing political figure.

June 12, 2014

Real gross domestic product (G.D.P.) in the United States shrank by 1 percent in the first quarter of the year. What made this announcement seem so significant?

We already knew that the economy did not perform well in the first part of the year — the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis initially estimated G.D.P. growth at 0.1 percent — and that early economic estimates are often revised substantially as more data become available.

The key difference is the direction of change. A shrinking economy is far more scary — and newsworthy — than a slow-growing one.

June 11, 2014

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s stunning primary loss Tuesday night will reshape the landscape not only within the Republican caucus but on K Street as well. As Dave Brat, his primary challenger, highlighted in his campaign, Mr. Cantor had a close relationship with business lobbying groups like the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable.

What’s less widely appreciated is how the defeat of Mr. Cantor — once seen as the next speaker of the House — will ripple through the ranks of Washington lobbyists, who often trade on their connections to the powerful politicians for whom they once worked. Former Cantor staff members are likely to find that they are less attractive to outside interests seeking influence on Capitol Hill.

June 10, 2014

Is vote fraud common in American politics? Not according to United States District Judge Lynn Adelman, who examined the evidence from Wisconsin and ruled in late April that “virtually no voter impersonation occurs” in the state and that “no evidence suggests that voter-impersonation fraud will become a problem at any time in the foreseeable future.”

Strikingly, however, a Marquette Law School poll conducted in Wisconsin just a few weeks later showed that many voters there believed voter impersonation and other kinds of vote fraud were widespread — the likely result of a yearslong campaign by conservative groups to raise concerns about the practice.

May 30, 2014

My new Upshot column is on the influence of partisanship on attitudes toward the age of presidential candidates - specifically, how the views of Democrats are likely to change now that Hillary Clinton is the likely older candidate instead of John McCain, Bob Dole, or Ronald Reagan:

Does a candidate’s age matter in presidential elections? It’s less relevant than you might think.

A Pew poll released last week asked voters how likely they would be to support a presidential candidate with various traits or experiences, like being a governor, a Catholic or a woman. Although these might seem like important factors in how people make up their minds, voters often seem to work backward, rationalizing their views of the likely contenders rather than expressing a strong preference for a particular type of candidate.

Lyndon Johnson was not known as a great orator, but 50 years ago today he stood before graduates at the University of Michigan and described his vision of “the Great Society” — a more humane society that “demands an end to poverty and racial injustice.” In his efforts to achieve those goals he enacted programs like Medicare, food stamps and the Voting Rights Act, giving Johnson an image of legislative effectiveness that every president since has been measured against.

On the anniversary of the speech, it’s worth taking a closer look at the Johnson presidency and the frequent comparisons invoked by critics of President Obama and analysts in the press.

The implications of Johnson’s administration for Obama are different from what many of these commentators think. What we perceive as presidential leadership (or lack of it) often reflects structural factors that are largely beyond the control of the chief executive himself — a reality of presidential power that critics of Mr. Obama’s speechmaking and relations with Congress often fail to appreciate.

May 21, 2014

Why is Jeb Bush struggling to find a message that will resonate in the 2016 invisible primary contest for the GOP presidential nomination? One reason, I argue in a new Upshot column, is the mismatch between the Florida electorate he previously served and the national GOP primary electorate:

The former Florida governor Jeb Bush is a strong potential candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination with one big problem — finding a message that will resonate with the activists, donors and elected officials who dominate the invisible primary process...

It’s true that Mr. Bush’s political skills may be rusty after seven years out of elected office.

But the deeper problem is that the messaging and positions that worked for him in Florida — a swing state with a large Hispanic population — are not necessarily a good fit with the national G.O.P. primary electorate, which is far whiter and more conservative.

In a new Upshot column that was published yesterday, I explore the relationship between domestic elite conflict and misperceptions using new survey data on Holocaust denial. Here's how it begins:

Why do misperceptions become widespread? More often than not, they have been spread by elites seeking political advantage. Many of the most significant myths and false claims in American politics were popularized or promoted by elites like Sarah Palin and Michael Moore, for instance. The same logic often applies internationally.

May 16, 2014

In my new Upshot column, I show that the Democrats' current advantage on major issues in the polls is unlikely to allow them to escape what appears to be an unfavorable electoral landscape:

Democrats know they face a difficult midterm campaign landscape, but they can cling to one seeming reason for hope: The public agrees with them more than with Republicans on the issues.

More Americans say they trust Democrats than Republicans on the “main problems the nation faces over the next few years” as well as a number of key policy issues, including the economy, health care and immigration. Members of the public also typically indicate that Democrats are closer to their opinion than Republicans on specific issues like abortion, same-sex marriage and raising the minimum wage.

This apparent political advantage is less important than it might seem, however. For instance, Democrats had greater advantages on several major issues at comparable points in the 1994 and 2010 electoral cycles, which both resulted in Republican landslides.

May 15, 2014

My new Upshot column is on pundit predictions and how the miracle of aggregation can make even a group of individuals with strong partisan biases collectively more accurate than they are individually. Here's how it begins:

Watching pundits and politicos speculate about what will happen in a coming election can feel like an exercise in futility. Most predict that their side will win, so what do we learn?
This blather may be more informative than it seems, however.

May 12, 2014

My new column for The Upshot focuses on a potential threat to Hillary Clinton's presidential prospects that is more significant than Benghazi - Obama fatigue after eight years of Democratic control of the White House. Here's how it begins:

The latest investigation into the Benghazi attack reminds us that the issue isn't going away any time soon. Pundits are already speculating about potential damage to Hillary Clinton's presidential prospects, but don't believe the hype: Scandals rarely matter much in presidential election campaigns.

A far more significant threat to her potential candidacy is Americans' desire for new leadership after eight years of the Obama administration. A Pew Research Center/USA Today poll found this week that 65 percent of Americans would "like to see a president who offers different policies and programs." Only 30 percent said they wanted ones "similar to those of the Obama administration."

Some of those disaffected citizens are presumably Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who will ultimately support the party's nominee in 2016, but the problem that the poll highlights is real. Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist, calls this the "time for change" effect.

In a column posted at The Upshot on Thursday, I draw on my research with Jason Reifler, Sean Richey, and Gary Freed to explore the reasons that educational efforts in support of childhood vaccines may sometimes fail:

Vaccines will prevent the deaths of tens of thousands of children born this year over their lifetimes. So why are potentially dangerous numbers of parents in some states opting out of one of the great achievements of modern medicine?

One explanation is that these parents are misinformed, seduced by the false claims like the myth that vaccines cause autism. If so, giving them accurate information might change their minds about protecting their children against communicable diseases like measles — a near-eradicated disease that has flared anew.

That's apparently the assumption behind the educational mandates that some states are creating or considering for parents who want exemptions from vaccine requirements.

But I recently conducted a study with several colleagues in which we found that parents with mixed or negative feelings toward vaccines actually became less likely to say they would vaccinate a future child after receiving information debunking the myth that vaccines cause autism.

April 24, 2014

My first post is up at The Upshot, the new politics and policy site at the New York Times where I'm now a contributor. Here's how it begins:

Should the United States be devoting so much effort to criticizing the anti-Semitic fliers that appeared last week in Ukraine?
...There are compelling reasons to take anti-Semitism seriously when it appears, and for American officials to speak up forcefully against the oppression of minority groups.
But there's a risk that the American response in this case could make the problem worse.

March 04, 2014

My final column for CJR is about how social scientists can contribute to media coverage of politics. Here's an excerpt:

This is my last post for CJR’s United States Project—starting this month, I will instead serve as a contributor to David Leonhardt’s new data-driven site at the New York Times. As I shift roles in my public writing from media critic to political analyst, it seems worthwhile to reflect on how the relationship between political science and journalism has changed over the last few years and to examine what academic insights journalists seem to have found to be especially valuable.

OBJECTIVES: To test the effectiveness of messages designed to reduce vaccine misperceptions and increase vaccination rates for measles-mumps-rubella (MMR).

METHODS: A Web-based nationally representative 2-wave survey experiment was conducted with 1759 parents age 18 years and older residing in the United States who have children in their household age 17 years or younger (conducted June–July 2011). Parents were randomly assigned to receive 1 of 4 interventions: (1) information explaining the lack of evidence that MMR causes autism from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; (2) textual information about the dangers of the diseases prevented by MMR from the Vaccine Information Statement; (3) images of children who have diseases prevented by the MMR vaccine; (4) a dramatic narrative about an infant who almost died of measles from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fact sheet; or to a control group.

RESULTS: None of the interventions increased parental intent to vaccinate a future child. Refuting claims of an MMR/autism link successfully reduced misperceptions that vaccines cause autism but nonetheless decreased intent to vaccinate among parents who had the least favorable vaccine attitudes. In addition, images of sick children increased expressed belief in a vaccine/autism link and a dramatic narrative about an infant in danger increased selfreported belief in serious vaccine side effects.

CONCLUSIONS: Current public health communications about vaccines may not be effective. For some parents, they may actually increase misperceptions or reduce vaccination intention. Attempts to increase concerns about communicable diseases or correct false claims about vaccines may be especially likely to be counterproductive. More study of pro-vaccine messaging is needed.